Centuries of Meditations

Emerson and the Transcendentalists. The nearest kinship of all is American. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Concord essayist around whom the Transcendentalists gathered in the 1830s, wrote in Nature (1836) that the true lover of nature “has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood”. In the woods, he says, “I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all”, and the First Century’s soul that fills the world could say the same. The likeness is uncanny. What separates them is the source of the vision. Emerson’s Universal Being is impersonal and its currents circulate through him, while Traherne’s infinity is always a gift from a person, received from a Father and bought on a Cross. The Transcendentalists recovered the eye without the giver, and Traherne would have thought that half the treasure.

The Last Page

The manuscript has the final word. After the tenth meditation of the Fifth Century Traherne turned the leaf and wrote the number 11, and under it nothing, and some fifty leaves follow with nothing written on them. At its opening the book was a gift of empty leaves, received, written in and returned with a task. At its close it is in the same state again. The argument has been made, the principles set down and the attributes of God begun, and what remains is a number waiting for its meditation and a gathering of clean paper. Whoever turns that last written page holds what the friend once held, a book with room left in it, and everything before it has been a lesson in what to write there.